Turbo Squid releases Turbo Toolkit at SIGGRAPH

SAN DIEGO Ã¦ Turbo Squid www.turbosquid.com, the exclusive publisher and worldwide distributor of the Discreet Certified 3DS Max Plug-in Program, announced the release of Turbo Toolkit, a suite of eight Discreet-Certified 3DS Max plug-ins in a single product. When purchased separately the products sell for nearly $4,000. The Turbo Toolkit is being offered for $1,695 until August 31, 2003.

"To celebrate Turbo Squid's third anniversary, we wanted to offer our customers a unique opportunity," says Dan Lion, VP of sales and marketing at Turbo Squid. "The Turbo Toolkit is just that Ã¦ eight premium tools for a fraction of their individual prices."

- AfterBurn3, from Sitni Sati. A particle effects solution that enables rendering of realistic effects ranging from clouds, pyroclastic smoke, dust, and explosions, to liquid metals, water and various procedurally defined "solid" objects.

- DreamScape2, from Sitni Sati. DreamScape V.2.0 is a tightly integrated suite of modeling and animation tools for building complete environments including mountainous landscapes, realistic skies, and bodies of water.

- HumanIK from Kaydara for character animation and rigging tools. Drag out a fully rigged skeleton with ease and make your characters walk, run, and jump within minutes. Quickly allows users to transfer motion capture files and re-target motions from one character to another.

- Kaldera, from Mankua. Kaldera is a plug-in that lets users render full scene information into special texture maps based on an object's appearance and relationship between itself and other objects in the scene. These texture maps are then "baked" into the object; that is, they become part of the object via mapping, and can be used to display the textured object rapidly on Direct3D devices such as graphics display cards or game engines.

- Act 1.6 Pro, from CGCharacter. Act is a muscle and skin system that enables animators to create realistic character animation with ease and speed. Act also includes CGAdam and CGEve, two complete human skeletal, muscle and skin character sets - all rigged and ready to animate.

- FinalToon, from Cebas Computer GmbH. FinalToon doubles as both a cartoon renderer and a technical illustrator. This line renderer is packed with features and line types that deliver anti-aliased quality with impressive speed.

- Texture Layers, from Mankua. Texture Layers is a mapping and texturing suite composed of two different 3DS Max plug-ins. One is an "all-in-one" UVW mapping layering tool and the other is a compositor map.